Welcome to 2017! After a well deserved rest, we’re all back and ready to kick off a new year of webinars – with my recommendations below. BTW: If you haven’t already, sign up for our mailing list to be sure you get my weekly recommendations in your Inbox each Monday. Click on the title of each webinar below to view the full description and register.

These event notes are based on a webinar presented by Supply Chain Insights on June 25, 2015. The webinar can be viewed on demand without any registration requirements here. I advocate seeing it for a look into some of Supply Chain Insights’ research on trends in supply chain talent development as well as to hear the stories shared by the panelists.

There are three events taking place this week, and they are all worth attending. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and connect to their registration pages.

The BMP events calendar is stocked for the rest of the month of May, and this week I recommend the following webinars… click on the title of each to connect to that event on our calendar and link to the registration page.

This week’s webinar notes are from an April 16th webinar hosted and presented by Supply Chain Insights. The webinar is already (!!!) available on demand.

Boy, did I pick a winner in this event. I originally attended to learn more about inventory management in the face of uncertain demand and fragile extended supply chains. What I came away with were some brilliant observations that will absolutely make their way into the book that Jon and I are writing on Procurement at a Crossroads in the form of quotes pulled from Lora Cecere’s Supply Chain Shaman blog.

“The best operating strategies and metrics portfolios are built when companies translate business strategy into tactical plans.” (p. 47)

Supply Chain Metrics That Matter (Wiley, 2015) was written by Lora Cecere, founder of Supply Chain Insights and author of the Supply Chain Shaman blog. I am familiar with her work from the many webinars she has spoken on, as well as through the Supply Chain Index developed by her research firm.

This week’s webinar notes are from an August 30th event hosted by Supply Chain Insights on the link between the supply chain and overall corporate performance. The webinar can be viewed on demand on their website.

This week’s featured event was presented by Supply Chain Insights and marks the official launch of the Supply Chain Index. Here is a brief excerpt from their event description:

‘The [Supply Chain] Index is based upon financial performance of companies from 2006 forward. Using market valuations of publically traded companies, we have built a formulaic representation of supply chain excellence using supply chain ratios (E.g. Ratios like Days of Inventory, Operating Margin, Revenue/Employee). … The Supply Chain Index allows companies to better understand the relationship between supply chain ratios and financial performance.”

In this week's sole event, we started the year with a look back at the last thirty years of supply chain management. It was a panel-format webinar hosted by Supply Chain Insights and moderated by Kelly Keller, Vice President of Marketing from Supply Chain Brain. If you are interested in more on this event, visit the Supply Chain Insights site.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

-- Henry Ford

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Kinaxis and brought us perspectives on the evolving modern supply chain from Lora Cecere, founder of Supply Chain Insights, a research, speaking, advisory, and training firm focused on making supply chain leaders and their teams more effective. Lora spent nine years as an industry analyst with Gartner Group, AMR Research, Altimeter Group and is now the founder of her own firm. Prior to becoming a supply chain analyst, she spent fifteen years as a leader in the building of supply chain software and twenty years as a supply chain practitioner at Procter & Gamble, Kraft/General Foods, Clorox, and Dreyers Grand Ice Cream.